I read an article in a St. Louis paper about parenting oppositional kids written by an accomplished therapist and educator.  It was great advice about basic ways parents could intervene with oppositional defiant kids.  What the article missed, what most articles miss, is how this behavior gets set up in the first place.  It missed the complexity of families, the subterranean happenings, the unspoken communications that overshadow whatever is being said and done on the surface.  It missed the essence of what is really going on and the fact that those behaviors are weaved into the fabric of the family.  So all the great intervention strategies will work for awhile and then they will stop working.  The situation will become worse than before the interventions were tried.

Here is what is going on in the underbelly: 1) Parents who need to be loved by their children and the children who know this.  The kids know that by giving their parents the love they so desperately need they will have a special place.  Parents end up as willing victims of extortion with the kids demanding more and more by holding love hostage.  When parents finally wake up and say “no” to this bizarre arrangement, usually for the wrong reason (like the price is too high), they are told by their entitled children that there is no escape or rescue.  If parents hold their ground and stop fulfilling demands, it is then that the oppositional defiant behavior begins.  2) Parents who sabotage each other by giving kids mixed communications.  It could be that one parent is the disciplinarian and the other is the “nice one” who never follows through with enforcing any consequences.  Or it could happen with grandparents usurping parents; misguided professionals taking the side of kids without knowing the whole story; the media telling kids that parents are idiots.  This breeds mutiny where oppositional behavior escalates and can turn violent.  3) Emotional incest where parents literally become friends with their children thereby breaking down all boundaries, the natural order of parents raising their kids and ending any possibility of effective parenting.  Friends do not have authority over each other and if, by chance, a parent decides to be the parent the kid-friend says this is not going to happen.  It is a small step to outright anarchy.

Suggestions for interventions are sometimes useful but they are just band-aids that do not address what is going on below.  It is the malignancies that we must face, sooner or later.  That is the true test of wanting a healthy family.

After 27 years of doing mental health counseling and life coaching, I’ve lost count of how many adults erupted in sessions when they realized that no one in their life had ever expected the very best from them.  No one, not even their parents, loved them enough, cared enough to push them to become somebody.

Their conclusion: Something is wrong with me.  I’m not good enough.  I don’t deserve to be successful, to be loved.  I have no real place or purpose in the world.  I do not really matter.

The ultimate disrespect is to expect too little…

Although it is not a laughing matter, I see it so much that I can’t help but smile at the tragic-comedy unfolding in the 21st century.  Kids, in all different settings, treating their parents like doormats on whom they wipe their feet without thought or regard.

The more puzzling part is parents allowing this to happen on a continuous basis. What’s up with that?  What are they thinking will result from this?  Does it buy them some alliance with the kid or is it simply weakness, insecurity and fear?  With footprints all over their minds, bodies and spirits, it seems counter-productive to raising healthy kids.

And it sets kids up for disaster when they go out into the world believing every adult will allow themselves to be walked upon with total disrespect.  This is not how the world works and many of us adults will not put up with this kind of dysfunctional behavior from your punk kid.  The kid will be stunned and eventually angry with you for teaching them a fairy tale version of reality.  Of course, by the time they figure out you set them up, you will have created some cute rationalization for your behavior.

Bottomline: Allowing your kids to walk all over you is a losing proposition for everyone.

We love to compare our present performance to what we did in the past.  “I’m doing better than I did last year.”  It stinks.  And it is a lousy comparison.  It allows us to dumb ourselves down and then that becomes the baseline.

The measuring stick needs to be: what am I capable of doing at my very best (my potential) and how far away am I.